MSFT working on XP for XO

One of the biggest problems the One Laptop Per Child program has is that it has no support plan. How do you sell millions of laptops to third world governments without offering to support them? I wrote about this last month here (XO laptop sales begin but support plan is nonexistent). I quoted Wayan Vota, editor of OLPCNews, which provided the above image.

“Ministers in the developing world need this in order to be able to buy laptops. Without a maintenance plan, what are they supposed to do, tell the kids to get a screwdriver and fix it themselves? That’s Humpty Dumpty on a massive scale.”

Well one way would be to outsource the whole problem to Microsoft. Consider this WSJ story, which says:

"We want Windows to run on the XO and we are investing significant energy and talent," Mr. Utzschneider said. Still, he said the Windows XO machine will have to pass muster before Microsoft supports it for volume use. "We really want to make sure we have a quality experience before we make commitment to governments."

Microsoft says it will start testing XO laptops running stripped down XP in India, the U.S., and Romania. XO running XP instead of the groundbreaking Sugar interface may just seem wrong, but it is one way to jumpstart sales to governments (which have almost completely failed to materialize), and OLPC is clearly ready to play ball. In fact, apparently, Negroponte is saying XP already runs on XO. But as Microsoft's James Utzschneider gently puts it, "that's not really the case yet." Utzschneider says that MSFT is getting serious inquiries from Ministries of Education interested in buying the XO with XP running on it. It won't be until mid-2008 ("at the earliest") that you might see production-quality.

For governments in emerging markets evaluating purchases of Windows for the XO, this means that so far we are not announcing an availability date, pricing, or support policies. In fact, you should not yet assume that Windows on the XO is a done deal. We are hopeful that we will have a different story for you within six months.

Technically, Utzschneider says, Microsoft needs to deal with a hard-drive-free machine (they have prevailed upon OLPC to add a 2GB SD slot to provide enough flash memory for the OS). This means redesigning the BIOS to run off an SD card. He also said Microsoft is committed to providing drivers to all of the whizzy thingies on the XO like wireless and webcams. From the support perspective, I found this most interesting, in light of Wayan's comments about kids with screwdrivers.

And we have a different support model than OLPC is envisioning: we are not expecting K-6 school children to access the source code and do their own programming in the event they have to fix a problem in the computer. Certainly, we think there is a role for students in the support of school computers -- but we also think that local entrepreneurs and businesses need to play an important role here when you are talking about deployments involving tens of thousands of computers.